My first memories of religion were being taken to Episcopal church. My father was Catholic but my mother I believe was Episcopal. So I sort of veered off into the watered-down version of Catholicism.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent at least since the early nineteenth century when 3 000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

I naturally wanted to be saved so when I came home I told my mom I wanted to be confirmed. That's the way I related to it being raised an Episcopalian. I went to Dallas and got confirmed.

I am an Episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously and I would I think be disheartened if my own young children were to turn away from the church when they grow up. I am also a critic of Christianity if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church.

My father was an Episcopalian minister and I've always been comforted by the power of prayer.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age he wanted to be an Episcopal priest because he so admired his priest a black man from someplace called Haiti.